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This research attempts to understand how individuals prevent themselves from exposure to COVID-19 when dining out at a restaurant and what situational factors shaping their COVID-19 preventive behavior (CPB) are. It collects 303 questionnaires responded by restaurant patrons in the United Arab Emirates. The resultant data reveals the ranks of the relative importance among the five CPBs proposed by this study that wearing a mask is considered the most critical CPB. In contrast, wearing gloves is the least desirable CPB. Concerning five health-risk factors under investigation, there is no difference in CPB between the vaccinated and non-vaccinated. People suffering from issues with their immune system show a significant inclination to stress social distancing compared to those without any immune issues. Those having an inflected family member are apt to wear gloves. Further, individuals bearing risk factors concerning chronic illness, an immune problem, and an infected family member are inclined to wash their hands and wear gloves. Lastly, this research finds six situational factors affecting an individual's CPB.

Recently, the institutional performance model has been used to explain the increased distrust of health care system by arguing that distrust is a function of individuals’ perceptions on the quality of life in neighborhood and social institutions. We examined (1) whether individuals assess two dimensions of distrust consistently, (2) if the multilevel institutional performance model explains the variation of distrust across neighborhoods, and (3) how distrust patterns affect preventive health care behaviors.

Using data from 9,497 respondents in 914 census tracts (neighborhoods) in Philadelphia, we examined the patterns of how individuals evaluate the competence and values distrust using the Multilevel Latent Class Analysis (MLCA), and then investigated how neighborhood environment factors are associated with distrust patterns. Finally, we used regression to examine the relationships between distrust patterns and preventive health care.

The MLCA identified four distrust patterns: Believers, Doubters, Competence Skeptics, and Values Skeptics. We found that 55 percent of the individuals evaluated competence and values distrust coherently, with Believers reporting low levels and Doubters having high levels of distrust. Competence and Values Skeptics assessed distrust inconsistently. Believers were the least likely to reside in socioeconomically disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods among these patterns. In contrast to Doubters, Believers were more likely to use preventive health care, even after controlling for other socioeconomic factors including insurance coverage.

Our findings suggest that distrust patterns are a function of neighborhood conditions and distrust patterns are associated with preventive health care. This study provides important policy implications for health care and future interventions.

This study aims to determine the impact of health-related views on mobile payment adoption in Sri Lanka from a broader viewpoint. The scale used to quantify each construct was based on earlier research, with modest alterations to fit the pandemic situation. First, an online survey was administered to undergraduates using convenience sampling to acquire appropriate replies. Eliminating incomplete and unusable questionnaires, 266 responses were gathered with an 88.7% response rate. Finally, after removing incomplete and ineffective questionnaires, 243 responses were selected for the analysis. Health consciousness, perceived ease of use, and usefulness have a significant positive relationship between attitude and behavioural intention to mobile payments. Moreover, the attitude has a significant positive relationship with mobile payment usage. As the health consciousness increases the usefulness and intention to use mobile payments, bank managers can focus on this new customer segment. Accordingly, they can use their promotional campaigns to highlight the importance of shifting towards m-payments during the pandemic times. This is the first study that investigates the role of health-related perceptions on the mobile payment adoption in Sri Lanka to the best of the authors’ knowledge.

This chapter investigates the status of urban youths’ knowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic and related prevention measures; their sources of information about COVID-19 and their trust in sources of information about COVID-19; credibility of urban youths’ sources of information about COVID-19; related prevention measures and the effect of the above on urban youths’ attitudes towards the adoption of preventive measures against COVID-19. An online survey and three focus group interviews were conducted to collect data. Results indicated that although the majority of young people in urban Uganda were knowledgeable about COVID-19, they also held various misconceptions about it yet this presence of cognitive dissonance, did not negatively affect their adoption of preventive measures. Instead, it worked as a motivator to find more information for change.

This chapter discusses challenges faced by older adult health-care consumers in obtaining access to responsive care from physicians relevant to a broad spectrum of health issues ranging from prevention to chronic illness and end-of-life care. Based on our prior research with community-dwelling elders (E. Kahana & B. Kahana, 2003, 2010), we propose a conceptual model of consumer self-advocacy for better access to effective health care in late life. We argue that older adults who are well informed and confident health-care partners and who involve their physicians in active dialogue will experience better care, and will be more satisfied with their health care. We present findings from our studies of cancer prevention and from our research focused on end-of-life care relevant to patient self-advocacy. We also discuss the role of educational interventions and of patient empowerment in facilitating greater access to responsive health communication and health care, particularly among elders who are disadvantaged and who have low health literacy.

Erica S. Breslau, Ph.D., M.P.H. is a scientific program director in the Applied Cancer Screening Research Branch, in the Behavioral Research Program within the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Breslau’s research interests focus on women’s oncology issues in general, and specifically as they pertain to the social, behavioral, and psychological influences associated with breast, gynecological and colorectal cancer screening. Recent efforts include ensuring that research is able to inform and improve the quality of health services among women disproportionately affected with breast and cervical cancer through the dissemination of evidence-based intervention approaches. She has conducted population-based research in the area of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases in military populations, and has implemented large-scale health promotion approaches to improve the adoption of prevention practices. Dr. Breslau received her Ph.D. in Public Health from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her Master’s in Public Health from Tulane University, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.Vasilikie Demos is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota-Morris. She has studied ethnicity and gender in the United States and is currently completing a monograph on her study of Kytherian Greek women based on interviews in Greece and among immigrants in the United States and Australia. With Marcia Texler Segal, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and of the North Central Sociological Association, and has been an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.Heather Hartley is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Portland State University. Dr. Hartley’s research interests include the sociology of health and medicine, the sociology of gender, the sociology of sexualities, and political sociology. Within these general specialty areas, her work focuses on the politics of women’s health, the pharmaceutical industry and the changing distribution of power within the health care system.Beth E. Jackson is a Doctoral Student in Sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on the traditions of feminist epistemologies and critical social studies of science, her dissertation research puts questions of epistemic authority and the nature of evidence into the specific context of public health and epidemiology. Specifically, she explores the conditions, contexts, tools and processes through which public health knowledge claims are made, by focusing on a particular technology of “population health” i.e. the National Population Health Survey (NPHS) (a longitudinal, biennial survey of the mental and physical health of Canadians and their use of health care services). Her research also speaks to policy implications of “situated” data and evidence – in this case, the implications of how “women’s health” is defined, and the extent to which a gendered analysis of health is considered in the construction and analysis of the NPHS.Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She conducts research in the areas of health policy, health across the life course, health behavior including preventive health behavior, and research into AIDS in geographically mobile populations. She has recently authored Health Care Policy: Issues and Trends (Praeger, 2002). She has conducted research in a variety of topics related to child health, including recruitment into CHIP (child health insurance program) and has published a book on the impact of school based health clinics, Schools and the Health of Children (Sage, 2000). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and past chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.Nancy Luke is an Assistant Professor of Research in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University and a Research Fellow in the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University. Her primary research interest is the impact of social organization on health and well-being, particularly among women and adolescents. She is presently co-Principal Investigator of two research projects, both of which include collection of household survey and ethnographic data. A project in Kenya studies the influence of marriage and economic transactions on sexual behavior in an area of high HIV/AIDS prevalence, and a project in India examines women’s empowerment in a context where norms sanction intimate partner violence. She has also collaborated with numerous non-governmental organizations on research projects pertaining to reproductive health and gender equity in developing countries. Dr. Luke has a Ph.D. in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.Deborah Parra-Medina, Ph.D., M.P.H., is Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina with joint appointments in the Department of Health Promotion, Education and Behavior (HPEB) and Women’s Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Epidemiology at the UC San Diego, an M.P.H. in Health Promotion at San Diego State University and a B.A. in Social Science at UC Berkeley. She has extensive experience working with under-served communities, having worked in several chronic disease prevention and control efforts including cancer screening, tobacco control, weight loss and nutrition. Her research based on a participatory action model emphasizes the intersections of race, class and gender and the influence of socio-cultural environment on adaptive and maladaptive health behaviors. This perspective is exemplified in her current research. She is Principle Investigator of the SC American Legacy Empowerment (SCALE) Evaluation Project that is examining how to effectively engage youth as agents for social change within the context of tobacco prevention and control. Dr. Parra-Medina was recently awarded a pilot study grant from NCI, the broad goal of this project is to foster individual and organizational empowerment among the emerging Hispanic population in South Carolina in relation to cancer prevention and health promotion through the development of the South Carolina Hispanic Health Coalition: Partnership for Cancer Prevention (PCP).Colleen Reid recently completed her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in health promotion research at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation was a feminist action research project with a group of women on low income. Together they examined the relationship between exclusion and health, the women’s varied discourses of poverty and health, and the promises and challenges of engaging in feminist action research. Dr. Reid has also been involved in community health research projects with organizations including the Vancouver YWCA, AIDS Vancouver, Literacy B.C., and the B.C. Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health.Elianne Riska is von Willebrand-Fahlbeck Professor of Sociology at Åbo Akademi University, Finland since 1985. She has been Chairperson of the Department of Sociology 1985–1997 and Director of the Institute of Women’s Studies at Åbo Akademi University 1986–1993. Elianne Riska received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974. She was an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University from 1974 to 1981. She was Academy Professor of the Academy of Finland 1997–2002. She is currently the President of the Research Committee of the Sociology of Health (RC15) of the International Sociological Association (2002–2006). Her most recent books are Gender, Work and Medicine (Sage, 1993), Gendered Moods (Routledge, 1995) and Medical Careers and Feminist Agendas: American, Scandinavian, and Russian Women Physicians (Aldine de Gruyter, 2001).Marcia Texler Segal is Associate Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dean for Research and a Professor of Sociology at Indiana University Southeast. Her research and consulting focus on education and on women in Sub-Saharan Africa and on ethnic women in the United States. With Vasilikie Demos, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of the North Central Sociological Association and past chair of the American Sociological Association Sections on Sex and Gender and Race, Gender and Class.Lynn Weber is a Director of the Women’s Studies Program and Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina. For the 2002–2003 year, she is Visiting Professor in the Consortium for Research on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity and the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality particularly as they are manifest in women’s health, in the process of upward social mobility and work, and in the creation of an inclusive classroom environment. In 2001 and 2002, she published two books, Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework and Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: Case Studies (NY: McGraw-Hill) which are intended to move the field of intersectional scholarship ahead by serving as a guide to facilitate intersectional analyses and to foster more integrative thinking in the classroom. Dr. Weber is also co-author of The American Perception of Class.

Racial and ethnic minorities utilize less healthcare than their similarly situated white counterparts in the United States, resulting in speculation that these actions may stem in part from less desire for care. In order to adequately understand the role of care-seeking for racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, we must fully and systematically consider the complex set of social factors that influence healthcare seeking and use.

Data for this study come from a 2005 national survey of community-dwelling Medicare beneficiaries (N = 2,138). We examine racial and ethnic variation in intentions to seek care, grounding our analyses in the behavioral model of healthcare utilization. Our analysis consists of a series of nested multivariate logistic regression models that follow the sequencing of the behavioral model while including additional social factors.

We find that Latino, Black, and Native American older adults express greater preferences for seeking healthcare compared to whites. Worrying about one’s health, having skepticism toward doctors in general, and living in a small city rather than a Metropolitan Area, but not health need, socioeconomic status, or healthcare system characteristics, explain some of the racial and ethnic variation in care-seeking preferences. Overall, we show that even after comprehensively accounting for factors known to influence disparities in utilization, elderly racial and ethnic minorities express greater desire to seek care than whites.

We suggest that future research examine social factors such as unmeasured wealth differences, cultural frameworks, and role identities in healthcare interactions in order to understand differences in care-seeking and, importantly, the relationship between care-seeking and disparities in utilization.

This study represents a systematic analysis of the ways individual, social, and structural context may account for racial and ethnic differences in seeking medical care. We build on healthcare seeking literature by including more comprehensive measures of social relationships, healthcare and system-level characteristics, and exploring a wide variety of health beliefs and expectations. Further, our study investigates care seeking among multiple understudied racial and ethnic groups. We find that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to say they would seek healthcare than whites, suggesting that guidelines promoting the elicitation and understanding of patient preferences in the context of the clinical interaction is an important step toward reducing utilization disparities. These findings also underscore the notion that health policy should go further to address the broader social factors relating to care-seeking in the first place.

Deborah L. Balk is a social demographer at Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). Her prior work has focused on fertility, marriage, health and gender in Asia and north Africa. Her current work integrates demography with geography, applying both geospatial and demographic data and techniques to one another. Her current research includes a study of climate, health and migration interactions in sub-Saharan Africa, and analysis of the global spatial distribution of population with particular attention to estimates of urban extents.Alejandro Cervantes-Carson is assistant professor of sociology at Mary Washington College. Born in Mexico City, he studied both in Mexico and the United States, obtaining a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas, at Austin. His primary areas of interest and research are political sociology, social inequality, and Latin America. He has written articles on gender, human rights, population policies and reproductive rights in Mexico. He is currently part of a research team studying a transnational community that connects northern Virginia, U.S., and southern Puebla, Mexico, and developing a project on deliberative democracy in the Zapatista movement.Denise A. Copelton is visiting assistant professor of sociology at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where she teaches courses on women’s health, medical sociology, and sociology of families. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Binghamton University (SUNY) in 2003. Her dissertation examined the social experience of pregnancy in the U.S., focusing both on the social construction of prenatal norms in popular pregnancy advice books and on the ways in which pregnant women accommodate and resist these norms in their daily lives.Vasilikie Demos is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Morris. She has studied ethnicity and gender in the United States and is currently completing a monograph on her study of Kytherian Greek women based on interviews in Greece and among immigrants in the United States and Australia. With Marcia Texler Segal, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and of the North Central Sociological Association, and has been an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales.Lara Foley is assistant professor of sociology and governing board member of the women’s studies program at the University of Tulsa. Among the courses she teaches are Sociology of Medicine and Sociology of Reproduction and Birth. Her work in this volume is based on her dissertation research examining the work narratives of midwives. Another article from this project, co-authored with Christopher Faircloth, entitled “Medicine as a Discursive Resource: Legitimation in the Work Narratives of Midwives” appears in Sociology of Health and Illness, 2003, 25, 165–184. She is currently working on a book project examining the experiences and roles of male partners in pregnancy and childbirth.Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld is professor in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She conducts research in the areas of health policy, health across the life course, health behavior including preventive health behavior, and research into AIDS in geographically mobile populations. She has recently authored Health Care Policy: Issues and Trends (Praeger, 2002). She has conducted research in a variety of topics related to child health, including recruitment into CHIP (child health insurance program) and has published a book on the impact of school-based health clinics, Schools and the Health of Children (Sage, 2000). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and past chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.Marcia Texler Segal is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dean for Research and professor of sociology at Indiana University Southeast. Her research and consulting focus on education and on women in Sub-Saharan Africa and on ethnic women in the United States. With Vasilikie Demos, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of the North Central Sociological Association and past chair of the American Sociological Association Sections on Sex and Gender and Race, Gender and Class.Chikako Takeshita is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech University. Her research interests include socio-cultural and political aspects of biodiversity prospecting and indigenous rights. She is the author of the article “Bioprospecting and its Discontents: Indigenous Resistances as Legitimate Politics” (Alternatives, 2001, 26, 259–282). More recently, she has been researching the social and scientific development of intrauterine devices, politics of medical representations of female bodies, and reproductive rights and population policies from a gender perspective. She has a M.S. degree from the Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech, an M.B.A. from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and a B.A. from Keio University in Tokyo.Carol A. B. Warren is Professor Emerita and former chair of sociology at the University of Kansas. Her former appointment was as associate to full professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. Among her recent publications are Gender Issues in Ethnography with Jennifer K. Hackney (Sage, 2000), “Qualitative Interviewing” in the Handbook of Interview Research (J. Gubrium & J. Holstein (Eds), Sage, 2002), Pushbutton Psychiatry: A History of Electroshock in America with Timothy Kneeland (Praeger, 2002) and “Sex and Gender in the 1970s,” in Qualitative Sociology (Winter 2003). She is working on a book, Discovering Qualitative Methods: Field Research, Interviews, and Images, with Tracy X. Karneer, to be published by Roxbury, and on articles (with Timothy Kneeland) on “Mineral Magnetism in Psychiatric Treatment” and “Natural Electricity in Psychiatric Treatment: Amber, Fish and Eels.”Terri A. Winnick earned a B.S. in psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University, Mansfield. Her area of interest is medical sociology, with a focus on professions; she is currently doing research on the reaction of the established medical profession to alternative medicine.Kathryn M. Yount is a social demographer specializing in the measurement of morbidity and mortality in less developed settings and in the integration of qualitative and quantitative data in sociodemographic analysis. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of International Health and Sociology and Affiliated Faculty of the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses primarily on multi-method case studies and comparative analyses of the determinants of disparities by gender in survival, health, and access to care over the life course. Yount has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the University Research Committee at Emory, and the National Institute on Aging to study these issues in the Middle East.

Prior to the mandate young adults wore masks 42.7% (n = 565) of the time and elderly adults wore masks 81.4% (n = 129) of the time. Also, 56.7% (n = 979) of females and 48.2% (n = 678) of males wore masks. Whereas almost all the observed participants (95.9%, n = 73) who appeared of Asian descent wore masks, individuals perceived as White were far less likely to wear masks with only 47.2% (n = 1,089) wearing masks, and 62.6% (n = 401) of perceived Black individuals wearing masks. After the mask mandate was issued 91.7% (n = 109) of those observed were wearing masks. Mask wearing declined shortly after the CDC guidelines changed to indicate that fully vaccinated people did not need to wear masks indoors.

Understanding demographic differences in mask wearing and responses to policy changes are important for public policy and public health.

This chapter is one of a few that include observational data of actual mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2021.

The use of behavioral insights and experimental methods has recently gained momentum among health policy-makers. There is a tendency, however, to reduce behavioral insights applications in health to “nudges,” and to reduce experiments in health to “randomized controlled trials” (RCTs). We argue that there is much more to behavioral insights and experimental methods in health economics than just nudges and RCTs. First, there is a broad and rich array of complementary experimental methods spanning the lab to the field, and all of them could prove useful in health economics. Second, there are a host of challenges in health economics, policy, and management where the application of behavioral insights and experimental methods is timely and highly promising. We illustrate this point by describing applications of experimental methods and behavioral insights to one specific topic of fundamental relevance for health research and policy: the experimental elicitation and econometric estimation of risk and time preferences. We start by reviewing the main methods of measuring risk and time preferences in health. We then focus on the “behavioral econometrics” approach to jointly elicit and estimate risk and time preferences, and we illustrate its state-of-the-art applications to health.